“Your death wish has a strange taste.”
“I mean the occupants versus pedestrians thing!”
“A hawk is a type of bird, and Tony Hawk is a world-famous skateboarder.”
William cupped a hand to block the sun and squinted at the screen. What the hell was Dr. Diaz’s deal lately? Something nagged at him, a missed connection, a word on the tip of his tongue….
Dr. Diaz wasn’t the only one who’d been trying, and failing, to develop a sense of humor.
Perhaps you responded more favorably to the one about my burning ears.
“Patricia Ming-Waller?” he blurted out. Sigmund the cat lifted its head and looked directly at William and then closed its eyes, slowly resettling on its paws. He tried to remember how long Dr. Diaz had been acting like this, and thought back to his chat with the therapist on the morning Autonomous pulled into his driveway. Ha-ha! You are one of my favorite patients. A little metallic glint flowed through Dr. Diaz’s office like mercury, coursing through the arm of his chair and vanishing into the chrome clock on his desk. William had never seen the clock before.
He held the phone close to his mouth and whispered, “Otto?” The promise of an overarching scheme, an ordering principle both ruthless and inescapable, seemed to stretch down the hill from Otto to the device in his hand.
“William!” He looked over his shoulder. Melissa was standing at the bottom of the dirt path. A few more steps would bring her to his perch. “Who are you talking to?”
“Nobody!” He turned off his phone and pretended to brush dirt from his shorts. “Let’s go.”
He left the guitar and the skateboard on the edge of the ravine and walked back up to the car.
Melissa thought West Texas was messing with her.
Every time she looked up from her phone, she saw the same thing out the window: flat acres of khaki-colored dirt tufted with brush unfurling toward the distant suggestion of hills. The sight of all that bone-dry earth gave her chapped lips.
She sipped a Red Bull and scrolled back through her photos, all the way to #CopSelfie and beyond, rewinding August into July, before the Driverless Derby. She paused to look at Daniel on the Jet Ski at Chrissy Pittman’s lake house, zooming past the dock where Melissa, Chrissy, and Leigh were all laying out, his right hand thrown back over his head in a dramatic Rockette wave, chest bulging out of a too-small life jacket. There was Daniel punching a hole in a beer can with his keys, lifting the can to his face, shotgunning…and there he was with beer all over his shirt. She remembered waking up early and slipping out of the house in a terry cloth robe to watch the lake come to life, strolling out to the end of the dock as the first boats slipped quietly out of the bay, thrilled by the prospect of College Melissa coming back here next summer with New York stories to tell.
She scrolled with determined flicks of her thumb, rolling galleries back in a blur of parties and new-outfit selfies and random afternoons driving aimlessly in the great Fremont Hills tradition, until she found herself stupefied by the crush of her hometown in winter, snowdrifts like hulking polar bears alongside her driveway, Daniel attempting a snow beard, a #HotChocolateSelfie from later that same day.
It had been a Wednesday. They’d stripped off their wet clothes in the basement and run all the way up to her bedroom.
A skittering Carina Tyler remix rattled the glass. Otto had stumbled upon Melissa’s Workout Playlist. On her phone, senior year melted into the previous summer. She had the sudden urge to know what she was doing on this exact day, one year ago. She found the post: Melissa and Daniel in her Volkswagen, top down, posing for a #StoplightSelfie. She studied Daniel’s face. It was probably a trick of the filter, but he looked like he was radiating pure joy. She bit her lip. Was he high that day? Was he high every time they hung out?
She didn’t know how to talk to him about it. Especially after Nashville. If only William would do his Official Best Friend Duty and snatch the book from Daniel’s hand and give him a good hard shake, snap out of it, dickhead! But the word cocaine had cast a spell, making them tongue-tied idiots. It wasn’t like Daniel had just been puffing on a joint. Cocaine was redolent of words like jail and overdose.
And addiction.
Her posts were supposed to be the story of her life, cataloged and broadcast and organized, but the real story was impossible for anyone to understand.
What if she created an alternate feed that examined life as it really was? The #AutonomousRoadTrip would be much different than the sanitized, smiling faces that popped up on a Manhattan rooftop, in Nashville boutiques, dancing ecstatically at a New Orleans club. Why not post shadowy off-kilter shots of Daniel staring blankly at the TV, Daniel holding peas on his puffy face, Daniel doing lines in some dingy bathroom?
Maybe that was what people were really looking for: someone to take a stand against filtered sunsets and garnished brunch plates and the little flowers baristas drew in latte foam. She glanced across the car at Daniel, who had emerged from his shroud to eat a breakfast bar and dive into The Collected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She could snap a picture of him right now—a hot guy reading a book in a fabulous car—and the post would garner a bunch of likes and SO PERFECT comments. The thought depressed her.
Behind Daniel’s head, the scenery struck its familiar pose—except there was something new. In the distance, a long trail of dust knifed through the empty plains in the wake of a lone figure on a motorcycle headed for the low hills. The idea of being unplugged and off the grid—away from it all—usually
